By James Goulden BSc MRICS, Chartered Surveyor – RICS Registered Valuer, Director at Wignalls
I’ve spent enough years standing in other people’s roofs to have a fairly settled view on who a survey should work for. So when the government’s Home Buying and Selling Reform consultation landed; proposing, among other things, that sellers commission a property condition report upfront, before a house even goes on the market, my first reaction wasn’t relief that the industry is finally being modernised. It was a more specific worry: whose side is that report actually on?
I want to be upfront about where I agree with this reform, because there’s a lot to like. I also want to be clear about the one part I think is being waved through without enough scrutiny.
The government launched its Home Buying and Selling Reform consultation in October 2025, alongside a parallel consultation on material information in property listings. Both closed at the end of December 2025, and the government published its response in June 2026, committing to a phased programme of reform.
The core idea is a “sales pack” — property searches and a condition report, both obtained by the seller before the property is marketed, rather than commissioned by the buyer after an offer’s been accepted, which is how it’s worked in England and Wales for as long as I’ve been in this profession. Where legislation lands eventually, mandatory sales packs sit firmly in the government’s own “future, when parliamentary time allows” bucket — not the near-term programme. What’s happening now, through 2026, is voluntary and non-statutory: guidance, encouragement, and a call for industry to start adjusting ahead of anything becoming law. If you’ve read a blog somewhere claiming upfront surveys are about to become compulsory any day now, that’s ahead of where the government actually is.
I think that gap between the hype and the timetable matters, and I’ll come back to it. But first, the substance.
The current system is genuinely bad at avoiding late-stage collapse. Buyers commission their survey weeks into a transaction, sometimes after they’ve already paid for searches, instructed solicitors, and started planning removals — and then a serious issue turns up in the report and the whole chain falls over. RICS’s own research points to survey findings as a significant cause of fall-throughs, and I don’t doubt it. I’ve delivered reports myself that ended a purchase stone dead, and every time, my honest reaction has been: this would have been so much less painful for everyone if it had surfaced eight weeks earlier.
So the principle of earlier information is sound. I’m also genuinely encouraged that RICS has pushed back on the idea that this information could come from a checklist or an estate agent’s walk-through rather than a properly qualified surveyor. RICS’s consultation response was blunt about it: condition information “must be professionally delivered by suitably qualified and regulated individuals,” and reliance on dataonly or agent-led assessments “is not a substitute for professional judgement.” I agree completely. A form filled in by whoever’s trying to sell you the house is not the same thing as an inspection by someone with professional indemnity insurance and a duty to get it right.
I’d also point out something I think has been underplayed: the reform, as currently drafted, doesn’t include a valuation as part of the upfront pack. Scotland’s Home Report — which this whole proposal is clearly modelled on — has included a valuation alongside the condition survey since 2008. Leaving it out here strikes me as an odd gap. If the point is to give buyers a complete, trustworthy picture before they commit emotionally and financially to a property, condition without value is only half the story.
Here’s my actual objection, and it’s not a minor one: a survey commissioned by, paid for by, and arranged by the seller is a report with a different client. That’s not a cynical dig at the profession — it’s just what “client” means. Even if the surveyor carrying it out is diligent, independent-minded, and doing everything by the book, the commercial relationship sits with the person who benefits from the property looking good. RICS’s own members raised this directly during the consultation, and RICS’s response reflects it plainly: the concern is that upfront condition reports “could shift the relationship between the surveyor and the buyer to the seller,” and that this “may risk buyers not being fully informed or independently advised.”
I don’t think that’s a hypothetical risk. I think it’s the single biggest thing government needs to solve before this goes any further, and I don’t think “publish some guidance and hope” is a solution.
What actually persuades me the model has a real flaw isn’t theory — it’s Scotland’s own data. Scotland has run this system since 2008, and by RICS members’ account, roughly 10% of Scottish buyers still commission their own additional, independent survey on top of the seller-provided Home Report. Think about what that figure is actually telling you. If the seller’s report were genuinely trusted by buyers as an equivalent substitute for their own independent survey, that number would be close to zero. It isn’t. A meaningful minority of Scottish buyers, given a free upfront report already sitting in front of them, still choose to pay again for someone who works for them alone. That’s not buyers being irrational or wasteful. That’s the market quietly telling you the seller’s report doesn’t fully do the job an independent one does — and I think government should be treating that 10% as the headline finding, not a footnote.
There’s a second consequence I think gets too little airtime: what this does to the surveying profession itself. RICS has flagged, fairly, that a model built around standardised upfront surveys risks favouring larger firms with the capacity to scale at pace, at the expense of sole practitioners and smaller firms — and has pointed to exactly this happening in parts of the Scottish market since the Home Report was introduced. I run a firm that sits somewhere in the middle of that spectrum, and I’d be lying if I said this doesn’t concern me. Reform that quietly consolidates who’s allowed to compete isn’t a side effect worth shrugging off.
If I were designing this rather than critiquing it, I’d keep the upfront condition report — the principle of earlier information is worth having — but I’d build in an explicit, funded route for buyers to get independent verification before they’re legally committed, not as an optional extra people have to know to ask for, but as a standard, expected part of the process. Scotland’s own experience shows buyers occasionally get to question the surveyor who wrote their Home Report, but RICS’s own findings note this “doesn’t happen routinely.” That should be the fix, not an afterthought. If a buyer can’t meaningfully interrogate a report written for someone else, “professional and independent” the report may be, but it isn’t independent to them.
None of this is law yet, and on the government’s own timetable it won’t be for some years. If you’re buying a property in Lancashire or Merseyside today, the position is exactly what it’s always been: get your own RICS-registered survey, commissioned by you, working for you alone, before you commit. Don’t wait for reform that isn’t here yet, and don’t assume a seller-provided report — if and when they start appearing voluntarily ahead of legislation — replaces the value of an independent one.
And if you’re a seller thinking ahead of the curve, there’s a genuine opportunity here too. Commissioning a professional condition report before you list isn’t just future-proofing against reform that may eventually require it — done properly, by a qualified surveyor rather than a checklist, it can also head off exactly the kind of late-stage surprise that collapses chains, on your side of the transaction rather than the buyer’s. That’s a use of upfront information I’d fully back. What I won’t back is treating it as a replacement for the buyer’s own advice.
I think this reform gets the diagnosis right and half the prescription wrong. Earlier information is good. A report that quietly changes whose side the surveyor is on is not — and if I’ve learned one thing from decades of surveys that ended a sale, it’s that whoever the report answers to is usually the whole ballgame.
James Goulden BSc MRICS is a Director at Wignalls Chartered Surveyors and an RICS Registered Valuer. He advises buyers, sellers, landlords and landowners across Preston, Lancashire and Merseyside.
Sources: UK Government Home Buying and Selling Reform consultation and response (2025–26); RICS response to the Home Buying and Selling Reform consultation (January 2026); RICS Home Buying and Selling Reform Hub, including FAQ commentary on Scottish Home Report experience and SME/capacity concerns.
© Wignalls Chartered Surveyors 2026
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